Koch Industries: Secretly Funding the Climate Denial Machine

The Koch Brothers have sent at least $88,810,770 directly to 80 groups denying climate change science since 1997.

The Greenpeace Airship A.E. Bates flies over the location of oil billionaires David and Charles Koch's latest secret political strategy meeting, with a banner reading "Koch Brothers: Dirty Money." The aerial message is directed to arriving attendees of the meeting and highlights the Koch Brothers ongoing use of their vast oil profits to push a polluter agenda through campaign contributions, lobbying, and funding fronts groups and think tanks.

We do this to hold accountable those who do not state their intentions honestly. Modern lobbyists decreasingly deny outright the irrefutable science, but instead deny the need for viable solutions — such as a cost on industrial carbon pollution, energy efficiency, clean energy alternatives to fossil fuels — as demonstrated by the science.

Why focus on Charles Koch and David Koch? Many large foundations associated with corporate fortunes are active in financing climate denial groups — Anschutz, Bradley, Coors, DeVos, Dunn, Howard, Pope, Scaife, Searle, and Seid, to name a few.

Unlike Koch, most of those fortunes did not come from owning a corporation like Koch Industries, historically rooted in fossil fuel operations. And none come as close as the Kochs in terms of decades-long focus on actively building a political influence network and coordinating other wealthy executives, corporations and families to dump amounts money into politics that not even the Koch brothers could afford.

Find a Koch-funded Climate Denial Front Group:

How Koch-funded Climate Denial Front Groups Work Together – Animation by Taki Oldham:

Billionaire oilman David Koch used to joke that Koch Industries was “the biggest company you’ve never heard of.” Now the shroud of secrecy has thankfully been lifted, revealing the $88.8 million that he and his brother Charles have quietly funneled to climate-denial front groups that are working to delay policies and regulations aimed at stopping global warming, most of which are part of the State Policy Network.

Today, the Kochs are being watched as a prime example of the corporate takeover of government. Their funding and co-opting of the Tea Party movement is now well documented.

Charles G. Koch and David H. Koch have a vested interest in delaying climate action: they’ve made billions from their ownership and control of Koch Industries, an oil corporation that is the second largest privately-held company in America (which also happens to have an especially poor environmental record). It’s timely that more people are now aware of Charles and David Koch and just what they’re up to.

A growing awareness of these oil billionaires’ destructive agenda has led to increased scrutiny and resistance from people and organizations all over the United States.

We continue to expose the connections between climate denial front groups and the secretive billionaires who are funding their efforts.

Audio recordings from inside the Koch’s 2011 secret strategy meeting in Vail, Colorado is available at BradBlog with additional reporting at Mother Jones.

What You Can Do

By spreading the word to your networks on sites like Facebook and Twitter, you can make more people aware of who the Kochs are and unmask the “experts” who take money from them to write reports and appear on TV questioning the wisdom of taking action to save the climate.